James Patterson - Step On A Crack

“When they come out, we’ll take them down,” he said. “Anyone who has a clear line of sight has a green light.”

“Roger that,” came back one of the Delta Force guys.

“Oh, and I want GPS on those sedans,” Will Matthews told one of his captains.

“Bennett,” Will Matthews told me, “get up on the roof and into a helicopter, in case we have to pursue.”

Not exactly overjoyed about heights, I can’t say I was extremely psyched about that task, but I nodded okay.

As I stepped into the elevator headed to the roof, I couldn’t imagine how the hijackers were planning on getting five steps out of the cathedral without getting massacred. I hit the button for the top floor.

Guess we’ll find out soon enough.

I DON’T KNOW how gung ho I would have been to climb into a helicopter that was on the ground , never mind fifty-one stories up. If I wasn’t so pressed for time, I would have crawled to the open doors to avoid the low, heavy chop of rotors.

The pilot must have noticed the green tinge of my face, or had a healthy sadistic streak. The second I was strapped in, the aircraft dropped off the side of the building, express elevator down, leaving my stomach back on the fifty-first floor.

After we slowed and stopped to hover four hundred feet over the intersection of 50th and Fifth, and I was done congratulating myself on not throwing up, I took in the whole of the cathedral for the first time.

It really was a beautiful structure, its spires and ornamentation as delicate and intricate as a wedding cake’s, which was mind-boggling, considering the whole thing was made out of stone. Instead of being dwarfed by the Midtown glass office monoliths it was surrounded by, it seemed to shame them and somehow make it seem like the skyscrapers were out of place.

As I looked down, eleven black Chevy sedans rolled slowly in from the north. They stopped in front of the cathedral, and the uniformed cops driving them jumped out, leaving the doors open.

Squad cars were parked at every intersection to the southern horizon up Fifth, their cherry tops flashing as they blocked the side streets on both sides.

What a scene.

“Doors!” someone called over the police-band crackle.

Down below, the tall front doors of the church began slowly opening.

A figure in a head-to-toe brown hooded robe and ski mask stepped out and stopped beside the stair railing.

I stared at the lone figure, waiting for just about anything to happen next.

Despite the fact that I was one of an army of cops, I was strangely anxious. One thing these sick puppies had taught us was that they were capable of anything, at any time.

There was a frenzied spattering of police radio chatter from my headset as another subject, dressed in the same brown robe and ski mask, stepped out a moment later. Was it the hijackers? What the hell was going on?

I twisted toward a flash of movement by the church doors.

A second later, my jaw dropped harder than the helicopter had off the roof.

Spilling out of the cathedral, walking in two straight lines down toward the waiting sedans, was a group of twenty-odd people.

All dressed in brown robes.

All wearing ski masks.

There was no way to tell the hostages from the bad guys.

“DOES ANYBODY have a shot?” Will Matthews cried out over the radio.

There were maybe thirty figures in brown robes out in front of the bronze doors of the cathedral now. They were moving slowly down the steps toward the waiting sedans.

“ Hold !” called a voice. “We’re scanning with radar for concealed weapons.”

On the roof of Saks, a sniper set down his rifle and raised what looked like an extra-long pair of binoculars. He lowered the binoculars finally and called into his sleeve.

“Stand down,” he said. “We have no shot. Heat signatures indicate that they all seem to have weapons on them . We have no safe shot. We can’t tell who is who.”

My earphones almost fell off as I shook my head. Jack and his hijackers had done it again. They’d anticipated how dangerous it was for them to get from the church to the cars. They’d anticipated our next move and somehow disguised everyone. Our snipers didn’t have a shot.

Down below, the brown-robed mass of people was climbing into the cars, three and four per car. After a moment, the tinted-windowed doors started to close one by one. That was that. Another golden opportunity lost, or taken away from us. The bad guys could be the drivers in each car-or they could be in the backseat, holding a gun on a hostage in the driver’s seat. There was no way to know.

I noticed for the first time that from the windows of the buildings on both sides of Fifth, citizens and media people were watching, transfixed. From where I was, it almost looked like a ticker-tape parade, only with celebrity hostages instead of sports or war heroes.

I stared at the idling cars. The big question remained: How did the hijackers think they were getting off the island of Manhattan? With the strange way that things were winding down, I was beginning to believe that nothing short of a bloodbath would resolve this.

It wasn’t just airsickness that made my stomach roll a few seconds later.

“Goddamnit to hell!” I heard Will Matthews cry over the radio. “Bennett, don’t lose them!”

When I glanced at the pilot beside me, I noticed that it was a woman beneath the aviator sunglasses and helmet. I knew I was in for it the second I saw her cocky smirk.

“What are you waiting for?” I said, and we fell.

WE STAYED AT a low hover over the convoy of black sedans. The whirling edges of the rotor couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the smooth glass and ornate stone building facades on either side of the avenue. I swallowed hard. Driving a car in this city was nerve-racking enough for me.

The hard, constant vibration of the helicopter made the cars below appear to tremble through the windshield when they finally pulled away from the cathedral. Now where the hell were they going?

The seat harness bit hard into my chest as we tilted forward and began to pursue.

We inched along in the air behind the convoy as it passed tony Fifth Avenue shops-Cartier, Gucci, Trump Tower. What, were they getting in a little last-minute window shopping?

An even stranger thing happened when the cars arrived at Tiffany’s on the corner of 57th Street.

They stopped!

Were they going somewhere for breakfast? Maybe Jack planned to rob the famous jewelry store as a parting gesture. Anything was possible at this point. The helicopter’s rotors thumped in time with my pulse as I waited and watched.

After a pause of a full minute, the lead car finally inched out from the curb and made a left-heading west on 57th Street. As the next four cars began to follow, I thought maybe the whole strange procession was going to take a slow rolling tour of the West Side. But the sixth car surprised me by turning east on 57th. The remaining cars behind it followed east as well.

I reported the bizarre new twist over the radio.

East Side, West Side, all around the town, I thought, watching the black sedans split away from one another.

Was one group the celebrities and the other the hijackers? There was no way to know from up here.

“Is there any way for you to distinguish who’s who?” Will Matthews asked in an anguished voice.

I stared at the two lines of cars, struggling to figure it out. The combination of diesel fuel, vertigo, and the constant pounding of the helicopter wasn’t exactly helping things in the focusing department. I gave up for the moment.